


Definitely Not Haunted

by servantofclio



Series: Val Shepard [15]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Cats, F/M, Ghosts, possible future crew appearances
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-05
Updated: 2016-09-11
Packaged: 2018-07-29 13:52:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7687096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/servantofclio/pseuds/servantofclio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seeking peace and quiet, Shepard retires after the war to a house that is so totally not haunted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Looking

**Author's Note:**

> The prompt for this fic was the first line. As I tried to come up with a fresh take on the line, my ever-helpful beta suggested a real estate scenario. The story now seems to be taking on a life of its own; expect several (shortish) chapters. Updated when I need a break from other projects.

“No, the house is definitely not haunted, why do you ask?” 

Neither of them had asked. The real estate agent laughs musically. “And I know it looks like a bit of a fixer-upper, but I promise you it’s in great shape on the inside.” 

“Really,” says Shepard dubiously. 

“Totally! Let’s go in and take a look.” 

The agent marches up to the front door. Shepard follows more slowly, eyeing the house. It’s a cool, soothing shade of green, two stories, with a pointed roof. Fixer-upper? After a lifetime on shipboard or in Alliance housing, Shepard hardly knows what a solidly built house is supposed to look like. 

With two windows overlooking the front door, it does look just a little bit like a face, though, doesn’t it? 

“It looks solid enough to me,” Garrus says quietly from behind her. “The agent sure seems eager to get it off her hands, though.” 

Shepard shrugs, heading up to the doorstep where the real estate agent is waiting with a smile. “Let’s see what the inside is like.” 

Inside, it’s clean, quiet, sparsely furnished. Haunted? No; rather, anything personal seems to have been stripped away and replaced with stock art or tasteful sprays of artificial flowers in narrow glass vases. 

“This is probably more space than we need,” Garrus says to the agent. “We’re really just looking for a quiet retreat for a few months.” 

“Of course, I understand completely,” the agent says. “There are certainly other properties you could take a look at. But this is really a special house, I thought of it as soon as you called.” 

_Because you wanted to get rid of it?_ Shepard wonders, but she wanders into the kitchen anyway, leaving the two of them behind in the living room. It’s a spacious, oblong kitchen. Plenty of room for two people to prepare two different meals. Not that Shepard knows how to cook. Smooth gray stone countertops, white cabinets. Shepard moves to look out the kitchen window, placed over the sink. 

Outside, she can see a small shed painted the same color as the house off to the right, and a stand of trees that degenerates into shattered tree stumps at the nearest edge. Beyond the trees are mist-covered hills; it’s too cloudy today to get a clear view. Standing there at the sink, Shepard has a sudden, powerful vision of a Reaper poised outside on its grasping black legs, its killing red beam lancing across the view, scorching and destroying those trees. Now, years after the war, those scars have faded. 

She smells tea and cookies. For a moment, Shepard imagines that if she turns around, she’ll see… someone. A middle-aged woman, her mind tells her, in a comfortable cardigan, nose buried in a book as she sits at the kitchen table with a cup of tea cooling by her side. Shepard finds she doesn’t want to turn around, caught up in the calmness of that image. 

Someone had a life here, before the Reapers came; maybe a peaceful, quiet, comfortable life. 

She turns around anyway, hearing voices approach from the other room. 

Of course, there’s no one sitting at the table. The tempting aroma fades away as soon as Shepard moves. 

“These are all high-end appliances,” the agent tells her brightly from the doorway. 

“I’m sure they’re fine,” Shepard says, glancing at Garrus. 

He smiles at her. “I hear there are two guest rooms, if we want them.” 

“Well, we could have people over,” Shepard says with a shrug, and follows them toward the stairs, looking around as she goes. 

“See, what did I tell you? Everything’s in good shape,” the agent says. 

_And definitely not haunted_ , Shepard adds to herself, sarcastically. 

Still. Shepard feels nothing but peace and quiet from this house. If there’s a ghost here, she wouldn’t mind seeing what its life was like.


	2. August

The house is suffused with quiet. Shepard has never lived anywhere like this before – not in the home of her youth, crowded with three younger brothers, not in the series of barracks and shipboard bunks that lasted her military career, not in her glitzy borrowed apartment on the Citadel. This house holds quiet like a sponge. Shepard wakes in the morning to sunlight arcing through her window and birds chirping, and goes to sleep with the sound of crickets. 

There’s no sign of the ghost for the first few weeks. Shepard could almost believe she had just imagined it. Garrus says he hasn’t seen or heard or smelled anything out of the ordinary. He’s taking to this retreat better than she would have expected; he set up a workshop down in the basement, where there are long tables and a surprising amount of light. He plays music over his visor while he tinkers away, and sometimes hums along. 

Shepard does a little digging and discovers that the previous occupant of the house was a middle-aged academic who taught literature at the college in the next town over. She’d lived here alone. It seems like a lot of house for one person; some days, it seems like a lot of house for Shepard and Garrus. They’re not even using all the space. They keep the guest rooms closed up, and they don’t have enough furniture of their own for the living room. 

“Oh, she wasn’t alone,” says their neighbor, Patricia. “She always had students in and out. Let them stay the night sometimes, or during school breaks.” 

Patricia lives half a mile down the road. She’d come over the second day with an apple pie, heaping with apples and cinnamon and brown, flaky crust. She’d apologized for not bringing anything for Garrus. 

“She was a nice lady,” Patricia tells Shepard. “Kept to herself a lot, but never seemed lonely.” 

Shepard mostly sees Patricia when she goes out for a run. If she goes the right direction, she loops past Patricia’s house, and sometimes Patricia’s out working in the garden, and Shepard slows down to say hello. One of those times, Shepard asks about the lights in the basement. 

“She used to garden,” Patricia explains. “She’d start seeds down there in the winter.” 

Shepard’s father had been an agronomist, but it was all large-scale, developing plants that would thrive on Mindoir. They’d had only a tiny garden and a couple of houseplants, no room for anything like that in their cramped little house. 

“She had a lot of hobbies,” Patricia adds. “She didn’t garden so much, the last few years before. Don’t know if she got bored with it, or if her arthritis was acting up.” 

Shepard thanks her and starts her run home. In the warm glow of movement, sweat prickling along her scalp and trickling between her shoulder blades, she thinks about their predecessor. It sounds like a nice life. Quiet. Reading good books, teaching young people, going home to her peaceful house and her garden. It’s the kind of life Shepard has never had, nor ever particularly aspired to have, back when she was a restless kid. Even then, before the attack, before everything, she’d thought vaguely about enlisting. 

And now… here she is, not yet forty, but with her military career behind her, and the rest of her life stretching ahead. 

When she arrives back at the house, she surveys the clumps of plants on either side of the front door and wonders if she can tell the difference between plants put there on purpose and weeds. Maybe the extranet will tell her, and later she can come out and yank out some of the weeds. 

Shepard climbs the front steps and enters the house. Inside, the kitchen smells like turian spices, not like tea and cookies.


	3. September

A bit over a month after they move in, a sudden cold snap catches them off guard, driving Shepard out of their bedroom the first cold night in search of warmer bedding. There has to be something somewhere in the house, she thinks muzzily as she stands on the landing with one pale beam of light from her omni-tool shining down the stairs. Maybe the blanket that’s folded up on the couch downstairs will be big enough. 

Before she can take the first step down the stairs, Shepard feels a gentle push against her back, accompanied by the strong feeling that she should go left. She shuffles that way, into one of the extra bedrooms and bumps her hip against the sizable chest of drawers that stands next to the door. It doesn’t budge, and Shepard rubs her hip, wincing. The beam of light catches the corner of something colorful poking out of one of the drawers, so she pulls it open, frowning. She doesn’t remember seeing anything like that before. 

The drawer is heavy in her hands; Shepard’s light passes over triangles and squares in green and blue and grey and yellow. It’s a quilt, crammed into the drawer somehow. Underneath it is another one, red and blue and black. Shepard gives up wondering how they got there, bundles them into her arms, and shuffles back to her bedroom. 

Under the quilts, she and Garrus sleep remarkably warm all night. When Shepard wakes up, only the tip of her nose is cold where it sticks out from under the covers. 

The chill in the air turns the leaves gold, and forces Shepard to put on layers for her morning run. It also brings in mice. Shepard realizes this when she walks into the kitchen one evening and sees something small and furry jump away from the loaf of bread on the table and flee across the floorboards. 

“Guess they must have gotten past the perimeter security,” Garrus says gravely when she tells him. 

Shepard smacks his arm with the back of her hand. “What perimeter security? It’s an older house, it’s cold outside, it stands to reason, I just didn’t think…” she trails off, feeling foolish. 

“Do you want to get traps?” Garrus asks. “Or call an exterminator?” 

Shepard makes a face. “Let’s just store the food in sealed containers for now.” 

But that night, Shepard thinks she can hear tiny skittering mice feet before she falls asleep, and mutters curses against planetary vermin into her pillow before Garrus reaches out and sleepily pats her back. 

In the morning, Shepard opens the door to find two dead mice on the doormat, accompanied by a gray-and-white cat with solemn gold eyes who seems to have been sitting there waiting for her. When it sees her, the cat yawns and stretches, its back forming up into a neat curve. Then it trots past Shepard into the house, twining against her ankles briefly. 

“What,” says Shepard into the open air. She shuts the door and turns around. “Cat, what are you doing?” 

The cat is investigating the house, sniffing at the corners and trotting around busily as if it owns the place. It all but ignores Shepard. It is a sleek, healthy-looking cat, with a thick, shiny coat of fur. Once it has explored the first floor to its satisfaction, it heads up the stairs. Nonplussed, Shepard follows. The cat wanders into the bedroom she and Garrus use, makes one circuit of the place, and pops out again. Then it heads toward one of the extra bedrooms and bumps its head against the door. 

“You don’t need to get in there,” Shepard tells it. 

The cat, plainly, disagrees. Ignoring Shepard, it butts its head against the door again, then stretches up to its full length and _leans_ on the door. 

The door pops open. 

The cat trots in, hops up on the spare bed, kneads its front paws against the covers, and then settles into a circle, looking up at Shepard alertly. 

Shepard thinks about the fact that she should probably get the cat out of the house, somehow, and considers its size and claws. “Fine,” she says. “I’m going for a run. You, uh, do your thing.” 

The cat yawns widely and blinks at her again. 

Shepard goes out, leaving the door open a crack behind her. 

When she gets back, Garrus greets her with, “Shepard, why is there a small mammal in the house?” 

She drains a glass of water before answering. “Beats me. It just came in. But I think it catches even smaller mammals, so…” 

Garrus blinks at her. “You’re going to let it stay? Doesn’t it belong to someone?” 

Shepard abruptly feels guilty about the prospect of stealing someone else’s pet. 

But the cat has no collar. When she checks with her omni-tool, she finds no microchip ID tag, either. The cat is patient with her handling, though it yawns at her again, baring pointed white teeth. “Don’t you belong to anyone?” Shepard asks. 

The cat, obviously, doesn’t answer. The cat is curled up on the opposite corner of the bed from where it had been before. The room also shows signs of its exploration: the rug is askew, and it seems to have tried pulling one of the drawers in the chest open. 

Shepard goes to investigate, hoping she isn’t about to find a mouse nest. 

Instead, the drawer is full of balls of yarn, neatly sealed in plastic bags. Shepard stares in wonder, slowly pulling one bag after another out of the drawer. There must be a dozen balls of a soothing mossy green, and another dozen of the exact shade of deep blue that Garrus favors. 

“I don’t knit,” she says to no one. She glances over her shoulder, but only the cat is there, staring at her with wide gold eyes. Shepard thinks of the house’s previous occupant, with her books and students and tea and garden, and her “lots of hobbies.” “I don’t,” she repeats, shoving the bags of yarn back into the drawer and pushing it closed. “I don’t need…” 

She stops. What doesn’t she need? A hobby? Something to do with her time? A sense of purpose? 

“I don’t knit,” she says firmly, and stands. “You can stay if you catch mice,” she tells the cat. 

When she walks out, she imagines she can feel the weight of the cat’s stare on her back.


	4. October

The leaves on the trees turn from gold to brown and then begin to fall, crisp and drifting into piles. They crunch and slide under Shepard’s feet as she runs. 

“Do trees on Palaven lose their leaves?” she asks Garrus one windy day, staring out the window at the leaves swirling in the breeze. 

“Mostly not,” he says. “Our plants are different from yours. And where I grew up, outside Cipritine, it’s in the equatorial zone. Hotter than most humans like.” 

“Mm.” Shepard bites her lower lip, and finally gives voice to something that’s been bothering her for the last week or so. “It’s going to be getting colder here soon...” 

Garrus chuckles. “Yeah. I don’t think I’ll be going out much in the winter.” 

“You could go see your family if you wanted to? Go home?” 

The question hangs in the air for a moment. It’s not that Shepard doesn’t want Garrus around. Very much the contrary. But she’s the one who decided to retire, who was burned out. He seems happy enough, but this isn’t his planet or his people. If he wants to go home, she’s not going to hold him. 

“Shepard.” Garrus sits beside her on the couch and leans in until their foreheads rest together. “I’m right where I want to be.” 

“I just don’t want you to—” 

“Unless you actually don’t want me to be here, you don’t need to finish that sentence.” 

“Of course I do,” she says, flooded with relief. 

He grins and kisses her, and one thing leads to another leads to lazy, languorous sex in the living room.

 

#

 

Shepard waits at the front window with a heightened sense of excitement shivering through her gut. She hasn’t seen any of the crew (except Garrus, obviously) in months. She hasn’t had _guests_ in her home in... even longer. She must have had guests some time since her party in the Citadel apartment (which was Anderson’s, not even really hers), but she can’t remember when. 

This is a good house for guests: two spare rooms, a spacious kitchen and living room. She imagines someone puttering around the kitchen, making tea and bread and cookies more competently than Shepard ever has or ever will. Shepard can almost smell the cookies, and fresh apples, too, but maybe that’s just because there have been fresh apples everywhere she goes for the last two weeks. 

A car stops in front of the house, and the imagined aroma fades away as Shepard opens the front door. Tali pops out of the car first, squealing “Shepard!” as she comes up the walk with open arms. Traynor follows, looking around with admiring eyes, and James brings up the rear, hauling everyone’s baggage out of the car’s trunk. 

“This is a _lovely_ house,” Traynor says as Shepard accepts Tali’s surprisingly strong embrace. “I always wanted to live in big old-fashioned house like this. We had such a little colony prefab while I was growing up, you know how it is.” 

“Yeah.” Shepard knows exactly how it is. She gives Tali a last squeeze and turns to offer Traynor a quick hug, too. “I guess I felt the same way.” She opens the door and steps aside so they can come in. 

“Nice digs, Lola,” James adds, hefting the bags with apparent effortlessness. “Mm-mm, what’s that I smell?” 

“That smells good even through my filters,” Tali says, and Traynor, already on her way to the kitchen, calls out, “Ooh, mulled cider, how wonderful, Commander!” 

Shepard frowns; she bought cider, yeah, but she hadn’t gotten it out of the fridge. Now there’s a pot on the stove, wafting sweet steam. 

Garrus must have done it, she decides. She heads into the kitchen herself. The cat is perched on the back of the couch, staring intently at each newcomer, and Shepard gives it an absent-minded scratch on the head as she goes by. 

Over the next few days, Tali becomes entranced by the falling leaves, and insists that they should rake the leaves into piles and jump in them. Shepard is dubious at first, but Traynor’s all for it, and Shepard quickly learns to appreciate the cool breeze on her face while she charges into a pile of crisp, brilliantly colored leaves that crunch and scatter under her weight. James stubbornly rakes the leaves into the biggest pile of imaginable, fending off all helpers, before flinging himself in. They troop out to the farmers’ market and come back with buckets of apples, more kinds than Shepard has ever heard of before, along with pumpkins and roasted nuts and cider and cider-flavored donuts and bottles od dusky beer. Garrus regards their haul with interest, and even consents to try a few things, proclaiming the apples “all right,” while claiming that a Palaven fruit called _vibus_ is much better, and it’s too bad that none of them except Tali can appreciate it. On evenings and rainy days, they drink more beer and cider (plus turian brandy, and the bottle of wine Tali brought from the very first rebuilt quarian vintner), and play games – card games, mostly, though Traynor manages to get both Garrus and Tali to play chess with her. Shepard, having learned her lesson already, declines. The cat curls up near Traynor at every opportunity. “I shouldn’t, I’m a little allergic, but I do love cats,” Traynor says at first, eyeing the cat wistfully. She soon gives in, claiming that “A few sneezes are a small price to pay.” The five of them talk, endlessly, about special ops missions and resettling Rannoch and the latest omni-tool mods, and about everyone they know. 

Late one evening, after Traynor has gone to bed, Garrus and James are off in the kitchen bickering amiably about something, and Shepard sprawls at one end of the living room couch with Tali curled up on the other. 

“How long do you’ll think you’ll stay here?” Tali asks, a question none of them have raised until now. 

Shepard leans her head on the back of the couch. “I’m not sure.” 

“Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice place. Quiet. And you deserve some quiet, keelah, nobody deserves it more. It just...” Tali hesitates. 

“Doesn’t seem much like me?” Shepard finishes, wryly. 

Tali looks at her hands, wound together in her lap. “It’s none of my business.” 

“Tali, you’re one of my best friends. You can say what you’re thinking.” 

Tali laughs a little. “I’m just used to seeing you moving forward, I guess.” 

“Yeah.” Shepard sighs. “I guess I’m not sure what I’m moving toward now. The Reapers are gone. I went back to the Spectre thing for a while, and I’m not sorry I did, but...” She shrugs. “There’s always gonna be more pirates and bandits and slavers and political squabbles.” 

“Tell me about it,” Tali says. “I thought it was bad before we had a homeworld. I had no idea how many things we could find to squabble about.” 

Shepard chuckles. “Yeah. It just never ends. There’s always one more mission that someone thinks is absolutely vital. But I’m not sure any of it really needs me any more. There’s Kaidan and James, and there are plenty of other Spectres and N7s.” 

“I don’t think anyone could ever accuse you of not doing your share for the galaxy, Shepard.” 

“Right. And I’ve just gotten tired of fighting. Of killing people. Even bad people.” Shepard swallows, hesitating. “Sometimes I worry that’s all I’m good for.” 

“Oh, Shepard.” Tali slides across the couch, pulling Shepard into a hug. “That’s definitely not true!” 

Shepard leans into the hug gratefully, squeezing Tali back. “That’s what Garrus says, too,” she admits. “But it’s hard not to feel that way sometimes.” 

Tali shakes her head. “Shepard, no. You... you build people up. I mean, look at any of us. Look at me. I was so young when we met, and I wanted to prove myself, but I had no idea what I was doing.” 

“Don’t sell yourself short, Tali.” 

“I’m not. No.” Tali stares hard at Shepard for emphasis. “You showed me how to lead. How to stand up for my people, and how to stand up _to_ my people, and how to make friends where I expected only enemies. I would never be who I am now without you.” 

“Thanks, Tali.” Shepard blinks rapidly. Her eyes have grown too wet. “I... thanks.” 

Tali hugs her tighter. “Any time. I’m sure any of us would say the same.” 

“I guess,” Shepard says slowly, “I’d like to find a way to build... something. Instead of breaking things down. I just don’t know what.” 

“Well, we have a lot of building to do on Rannoch,” Tali says. 

Shepard smiles. “I’ll keep that in mind.”


	5. November

After their friends leave, the weather quickly shifts from cool and crisp to cold and damp. A swelling storm turns the ground to mud and hurls the last leaves from the trees overnight. They lie in brown, paper-thin layers, sinking into the mud and darkening with rot. The trees stand bare and forlorn against the the gray sky, only a straggling handful of limp leaves clinging to their limbs. 

Garrus does not complain about the change in weather, but he does spend more of his time indoors, reading or watching vids by the fireplace, or tinkering in the workshop where the heat is turned to high. Shepard doggedly continues her morning runs, even though the wet leaves slip and slide under her feet. Sometimes a scrim of frost glitters over the masses of muddy brown, and her breath puffs out into pale clouds in the air. 

She marvels as she runs at how open the landscape has become. Paths that were once shaded and tree-lined stand now stark, open, and bare. She can see for miles through the spaces were living foliage used to be. Distant houses and barns are now unveiled to her view, catching her eye with spots of bright paint or chimney smoke curling into the bright sky. 

Hints and invitations have trickled into her messages. It’s not only Tali’s suggestion that she come help on Rannoch. Liara invites Shepard and Garrus to come see her new home in Armalis. Wrex, with two krogan infants climbig his hump, tells her that they are always welcome on Tuchanka, “even Garrus.” Bakara adds that they don’t need to fight any wildlife unless they want to, no matter what Wrex says. Garrus passes on that his father and sister would be happy to have them for a visit if they’d like. Miranda mentions that her apartment on Illium has a spare room. Shepard counts all those and more up on her fingers. If she wanted, she could spend the next three years of her life shuttling from guest room to guest room, lending a hand to whatever her friends have going on. There is rebuilding to do everywhere: not just Rannoch, but here on Earth, too, and on Palaven, and Thessia, and Illium, and everywhere else. 

She could spend the rest of her life putting one brick on top of another, and still barely make a dent in the destruction the Reapers left behind. 

She thinks it over, running. Garrus once said, only half joking, that after the war the Hierarchy would need a leader who knew how to hold a hammer. Part of Shepard thinks that wielding a hammer can’t be that hard. The other part remembers how much she cursed over those ship models she built, piece by tiny piece, and the models came with instructions. And Garrus, no matter what he says, is far more of a tinkerer and builder than Shepard has ever been. 

She gets an invitation that must have been prompted by James, to teach at the next N-school class. She lingers over that one for a while, even calling the contact back to ask questions. 

“Your experience is obviously unparalleled,” the major on the other end tells her. “We’re always looking for ways to hone our training programs, bring in more variety and operational experience. N-school recruits are more varied than ever these days. We get a lot of ex-guerrilla fighters and a few ex-Cerberus operatives besides the traditional Alliance recruits. They usually have plenty of combat experience. Some of them think they’ve seen everything already. To be honest, having someone of your caliber would be a real wake-up call for them.” 

“Glad to serve,” Shepard says dryly.   

“We’re trying to do a lot of cross-training with other races, too. A lot of people ended up on cross-species commando teams during the war, and it seems to have been effective.” 

“It certainly worked for me,” Shepard says, and they talk for a few minutes about the logistics of forming teams with such diverse training experiences. Shepard promises to think about the opportunity and signs off. 

She wanders from the console back into the kitchen, and finds the cat sitting on the table, a dignified mount of gray fur. The cat is staring intently at an empty chair.

“Hey,” Shepard says.

The cat ignores her.

Shepard sighs. “Hey, you know you’re not supposed to be on the table. Get down.” Normally, the cat comes and goes as it pleases. _Not on the table_ is the one rule they’ve attempted to set. 

The cat keeps staring at the chair. As Shepard approaches, half-heartedly makes a shooing motion, the cat edges its way across the table away from her. It doesn’t jump down until she leans over, threatening to shove it off. Then it leaps gracefully to the floor, trots out of the room with its tail in the air, and sits down right outside the door to lick its paw. 

Shepard sighs, exasperated. As she turns to go, she bumps into the chair the cat had been staring at. Something small drops to the floor, a quick motion that she only barely notices. When Shepard bends down to see what it is, she finds a tea bag. 

She picks it up, frowning. It’s a plain, unlabeled bag bag, perfectly dry. She has no idea how it got there. Shepard’s more of a coffee drinker. Maybe Traynor left it? As she holds it up, a powerful aroma wafts out of it: black tea and citrus and a hint of something floral that she can’t identify. 

The scent doesn’t bring Traynor to mind, though. When Shepard blinks, she gets instead a brief sense of _presence_ , as if someone gray-eyed and gray-haired were standing by the stove watching her, cup in hand. 

When she turns her head, there’s no one there. 

Shrugging, Shepard tells herself that she didn’t expect to see anyone anyway.


End file.
